so definitely when flying from countries with endemic mosquito-borne diseases, WHO policy is usually to spray the cabin with insecticide. usually this happens after everyone's boarded, and before takeoff. has happened to me many, many times.

curiously, the CDC says there's no evidence that it actually works, and they recommend against it.

to the bedbugs . . . airplanes are bloody filthy. they don't get cleaned often or well.

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

Just when I thought flying couldn't be more of a pain in the ass.

Commercial jetliners are only fumigated when it's absolutely necessary, such as when an insect infestation is noted by the cabin or flight crews. Most of those issues are first written up in the crews' logbooks and the planes are then pulled from service and routed to a maintenance base or a hub for such things.

If it's a real emergency, local station managers or directors can pull from a list of approved companies the airline's supply chain folks maintain. But aircraft cabin interior fumigation in every instance is a very specialized operation when it's done at all. Airlines usually try to deal with the problem in other ways before injecting deadly fumigants into what is a closed atmosphere, for all intents and purposes.

In all my years in the airline industry, I've only ever heard of one plane that had to be routed to a large maintenance base so that a bedbug problem could be dealt with. Standard aircraft cabin cleaner crews certainly aren't equipped to deal with the problem, as they have neither the equipment nor the technical skills.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

A few years ago my wife and I both developed scabies, shortly after returning from vacation. We're pretty sure we got it from the airplane seats (can't prove it of course).

We both had it on our elbows and the back of the legs just above the knee - those areas which you might expect to be vulnerable if you're wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I'm not particularly squeamish, but now wear pants and a long-sleeved shirt when flying, even if I'm going someplace warm.

As part of my airline security work I see aircraft cabins being cleaned every day, including full-on "deep cleans" that take three hours for a six-person cleaning crew to do (18 man-hours, IOW), thorough cleaning when a plane is spending the night at an airport (which takes anywhere from an hour to three hours for a six-person crew to do, and "turn" cleans -- when a plane comes in, discharges its passenger and baggage load and then loads up and leaves again. That cleaning could take a three-person cleaning crew from 15 minutes to 30 minutes to do.

I'll say that commercial airliners spending the night being "RON" ("routine overnight" or "remain overnight") cleaned and then leaving on their first trip of the morning are pretty clean. Planes deep-cleaned ("EIC" or "enhanced interior cleaning") are very clean when they leave on their first flight of the day, and they remain relatively clean for some time. Turn cleans, though, are simply surface-cleaned -- much as you see when a movie theater is cleaned and swept between showings of a picture.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Thanks for the insights. I'm actually impressed by how clean aircraft usually are.

The only instance I can think of where a commercial jetliner might see a routine or matter-of-course insecticide application or fumigation would be during "heavy maintenance," which is generally a 'D' check and a serious, serious maintenance run-through of the aircraft. Fumigation is never routinely done during EICs, which each aircraft -- at least at the airlines we assist with security -- is theoretically supposed to undergo quarterly or monthly (the RON cleans are not quite as thorough, but the planes are still cleaned fairly well, and they get those every night at whatever station they're overnighted at).

I don't know BA's protocol for customer service recovery, or CSR, when it comes to these issues. The in-flight cabin crews (flight attendants) are usually the first point of contact when it comes to problems like these while the aircraft is in the air, then the captain and then ground operations customer service supervisors and managers when flights arrive and/or depart. Somewhere along the line, this customer either didn't let the ground ops CSMs know about the issue when she arrived, or she was gaffed off and told to complain at the airline's website. I've seen that happen more times than I can easily relate, which is sad.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

have also heard that low levels of insecticides get added to cabin air (how about a conspiracy theory right here?).

I think the chemtrails go outside the plane, not inside. :)

Chemtrails! You're watching too much Alex Jones and Infowars. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."